


Meant to be Lost

by Morbane



Category: if twenty - Mandate of Heaven (Song)
Genre: Brainwashing, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Dark, Dubious Consent, Dystopia, Gods, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-09 21:58:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18925801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: To be Chosen means never to choose again.





	Meant to be Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlTheAlchemist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlTheAlchemist/gifts).



> _Additional content notes at the end._

Evri grew with the god's hand on his shoulder.

In that time and place, it was a phrase that people used to say that someone was an orphan, and so was _god-touched_ or _standing in the god's palm_. Once, someone painted a pointing hand on the outer wall of the orphanage, and Evri and the other orphans had had to spend a cold grey morning hour scouring it off, while the rain scoured them in turn. It couldn't wait. It was bad enough having drawn the god's attention already. Ordinary people agreed that you didn't want any more. The orphanage was built on a site that had been razed in religious conflict a decade ago; the superstitious said it was the same principle as hoping lightning wouldn't strike twice in the same place. Here the feet of the god had passed. Here, it was hoped, they would not trample again.

The orphanage was not a bad one. It had a large library. In one book, Evri read a heretical cosmology that stated that once there had been two gods - the god and his twin sister. They had fought and the sister had lost. All good in the world was her memory, her ghost, but evil lived and it was stronger.

Another book, thick and dry, argued that humanity's purpose was to set itself against the god, even if this was futile - but if this was not futile, it was humanity's purpose to overcome and surpass him and bring goodness to a world that had never had it. From darkness, it argued, came light. The god was the Great Antagonist of creation, setting humanity's task before it. All humanity had evil in it, the legacy of the god, but also the potential for more, far beyond the imaginings even of those who lived in modern times.

Evri finished reading that book only a week before he left the orphanage for the last time. It was one of those occurrences that could have become a turning point in his life, and wasn't. But he remembered it later, and wondered what might have happened instead.

He didn't mean to leave the orphanage. Yes, he walked out through the gates, but only on an errand from the head of the orphanage, going to collect a donation of shoes.

It was a golden afternoon, sun pouring endlessly through thinning leaves, and a man walking ahead of Evri reached up and grasped at a leaf in the air as it fell. He caught it, but he let it go again so swiftly and smoothly that it could have been water flowing through his fingers. And when it fell to the ground it was a bonds-note, stiff and smooth, currency in the denomination of twenty.

Evri followed the track of the note through the air, but he forgot it almost as soon as it had fallen. He looked back up at the golden man, the god. He knew it was the god. The god walked, and Evri followed.

They walked for hours, through less and less familiar streets and past where the streets ended. They walked out of the city, and they kept walking. Somehow Evri never drew any closer to the god than the distance they had had when he first caught sight of him. Somehow, he was able to walk for hours without tiring. He was able to follow the god through the twilit countryside and then the dark, with no moon in the sky and uneven roads. He knew the god was ahead of him. The god never looked back. He knew the god was aware of him.

They kept walking, and in daylight, the sight of the god ahead of him was like the feeling of water filling a thirsty mouth, of fitting a puzzle-piece, of landing from a jump. Every time Evri blinked and opened his eyes again, the sight of the god in front of him made the world whole.

They came to another city. No one looked at them, or spoke to them even to beg or solicit business. The god had made himself known only to Evri. The god strode without stopping past his worshippers and his protestors, past homes and businesses and jails and churches.

They walked for weeks.

When they stopped - when Evri stopped, because suddenly the god was no longer there - Evri felt all the pain at once of his weeks of walking. He fell the ground, and instead of catching himself he reached his hands out to where the god had been, his chin the last part of him to rattle on the hard road as he stared ahead into the empty air.

The pain was soaring, submerging pain, shrilling pain: his feet were gongs and the lightest pressures of air or dust were hammers to strike them and send soundless, resounding pain through his body; he could hear the song he made. His gut clenched and his back strobed in agony. It was impossible pain, because it was the pain of someone who had torn his feet to shreds twice over - who should not have had feet to tear apart again - but his feet were whole. It was the pain of someone who had starved to death already, added to the pain of someone who had already died of thirst, and yet there was saliva in his mouth.

He could have died there, in actuality, where he'd fallen, struck down by the god's revelation of pain, but he did not. He knew that survival was the only way to see the god again.

Some of the inexorable endurance the god had granted to Evri remained. Perhaps if he had not kept the god before him in his mind as he had kept him before him in their journey, he would have had no strength, but as it was, he had enough strength to get back up on his feet and walk. He walked until he found a tree with fruit to pick and a field where cabbages grew. He dug a cabbage out, dragged it away like an animal, and ate it all. His stomach surged against his skin like his frightened heart in his chest. He dragged himself on hands and knees a mile down the road and slept in a ditch. He got up, and continued with his survival.

In the days that followed, his head began to clear a little of the fog of the god, and his enthralment retreated enough for him to realise what he had lost, and mourn it. He had had friends at the orphanage, and friends in the city, and friends at the factory where he had worked, saving a little of his wages after a portion went to the orphanage; he had been earning his own money for years and had imagined travelling. But not like this.

Now claimed by the god, Evri would be his always. That was what he had read, and even if he hadn't, it would have seemed self-evident. Now that he had seen the god, now that he had followed him, he could not imagine an existence in which part of his mind did not turn and tug towards the world's darker sun. He could not train himself away from that yearning as an addict might sometimes recover or an unrequited lover settle their feelings on another. It was for the god to pick him up and put him down again.

He had a week to mourn his old life and reconcile himself with the new, and then the god appeared to him again.

This time the god led him through the fiercest of his wars, and though Evri thought the places the god took him must have been very far away, it still seemed as though they covered the ground only by walking. Evri stayed silent behind the god's shoulder as he ranged between piles of bodies or stopped in this or that command outpost. From his position, he did not see the emotions displayed on the god's face, but he saw the expressions on the men and women that the god spoke to, and he saw their faces dance and contort the way a piece of paper will dance when you throw it into a fire.

The wars were eternal. He knew that, even though he had been brought up in a city almost free of blessings, where the wars had not come for a decade. The god loved to see his people fighting. Sometimes an ambitious cult sprung up whose devotion delighted him, and he championed them for a time. But more usually, it was an ordinary conflict of pettiness or scarcity whose sparks he fanned into flames.

The first time that the god kissed Evri, it was after he had put a light, ornamented sword in his hand and said, "Kill." 

And in horror and enthralment, Evri stepped forth and swung and stabbed with his sword, on a battlefield that appeared as if for his benefit. He fought clumsily - against men with bayonets and rifles and mortars - and bathed himself in blood. Worse than the dying that surrounded him, worse than carrying out the killing, was the horror on others' faces when they saw that their weapons did nothing against this phantom armed only with a metal blade.

It was one of those times when Evri was allowed to be aware of the limitations of a body, and so when his hands shook he lowered his sword, and the god came down and swept him away to another place. The god came very close and closed his lips on Evri's skin, as if his mouth was catching a butterfly, and it still beat to escape. Evri gasped, already forgetting the slaughter behind him.

It must have been pleasing to the god. He pulled Evri closer and then began to explore Evri's suddenly naked body, perfunctory, like a horse-buyer checking teeth. Evri shivered in genuine desire as the god cued him to kneel and then bracketed him with his thighs. Evri strained his mouth willingly around the god's cock.

The god never ejaculated as a man would. Sex with the god never seemed to truly end - Evri only woke up with confused, disturbing images in his head, not knowing if he had fallen asleep, or been struck unconscious through some sensation he was unable to bear, or if the god had just sent his thoughts away like a toy of which he had grown bored. 

Once, the god approached him, and then Evri woke, and he was sure time had passed in between. He was alone when he woke, and it was another drift of weeks before the god collected him into his retinue. When he did, Evri begged him not to take parts of his memories again. He was not even sure that that was what the god had done - only that it horrified him when he thought he was numb to horror. If the god had done it as punishment, he begged to know how to deserve the punishment less in future.

The god gave him a long, smiling look, and one of his rare replies. "No," he said. "I make you no such promises as you entreat me to." He caressed Evri's face. "But I forgive you for asking."

When the god left him, now, it was not merely because he had cast him adrift, but because Evri had some task or purpose that the god was not concerned to watch over. The god sent him, sometimes invulnerable and sometimes merely capable of surviving pain, to threaten and make demands of wayward worshippers. The god sent him to lie and flatter and stir one people against another. The god sent him to slaughter armed forces who may as well have been children for all the might they could bring against him. The god sent him as a loathed ally and counsellor. Evri thought it did not matter what he said; the god would have them all in the end. But the god loved his pageantry. Evri played his part and kept his counsel.

He travelled light: clothes, a knife, matches, a candle, something well-preserved to eat, the Book of the God. There seemed no point to possessions when he was himself a possession. He had been long enough in the god's service that most who knew him, all but the most innocent, knew what he was at first glance. The face that his childhood friends might have recognised was disappearing behind a mask of indifference, shaded with the faintest hint of malice.

The god gave him servants and sweetmeats, and took them away; the god gave him honour and favour and fucked him to screaming in joy; the god sent him to be tortured by those who hated the god, and healed him of his hurts. In his mind, behind his mask - where the god, of course, could see, but it gave the illusion of dignity - Evri wept. And the god enjoyed him and his tears.

The enthralment faded, slowly, through the ugly years, perhaps because it bored the god, or perhaps because the god hoped to enjoy his despair. Despite knowing that his yearning for the god would never end, he began to imagine an end to his service by some magical means. And yet he knew that he had not earned any uncomplicated freedom. He had been the god's messenger, and executioner, and destroyer. He longingly remembered the boy who had known only tales of the god - felt only the faintest brush of his hand.

Reading the Book and the records of the god's deeds, he planned a blasphemy.

When the god next infused him with a loan of power, he acted on his audacity. Instead of setting out on his errand, he found himself a bare, humble room, and composed himself, and drew on the god's power to do what he had read of the god once doing - 

\- which was to disappear and scatter like a puff of smoke in one place and form in another, travelling neither forward nor back nor from one side to the other, but through the most intricate possible machinations of time. It was no light deed; for those who were not gods, it was the obliteration of the one who performed the spell.

The Evri who travelled with the god was a half-creature, eaten away rapidly by life after half-life, and it seemed right to him that he was present barely as a watcher as he brought himself to the moment when a young man saw a god turn a leaf into money, and stepped towards him.

Evri - invisible against the god's glory - reached out a hand to stop his past self by any means he might, and found his hand caught.

The god - doubled in this scene as Evri was doubled - stood close by him, laughing, painfully at ease. "No," he said, "and now you will see what your choices have earned you."

Instead of dying, Evri lingered, present, but if he were nothing but presence. He was a passenger in his old body, intangible to his old self, but living his old self's life again. And where Evri of the past was enraptured, Evri who had transgressed felt all the pains that should have been due to him as though they had occurred to an ordinary mortal. The first weeks of walking dissolved him into pain. The first touch of the god made him scream as only a voiceless thing can scream. And then he watched and felt as the Evri-that-was killed innocents again... 

This was his punishment: to watch only, and to take on all the burdens of pain and difficulty that the god had spared Evri the first time. Perhaps, before, the choices before him had been illusions, and no choice at all, but now there was no illusion, and Evri saw how narrowly his path had been laid.

It had been perhaps five years of service, and now it felt like five hundred.

Yet somehow, it came around again: the moment where Evri would try to reverse it all and make a different choice.

Evri who watched could not endure it all a third time.

His choice of picking up the god's dropped money had been taken from him; there was a correlation to that that was bittersweet. When Evri the servant opened the book and began to use his borrowed power, Evri who watched destroyed the spell.

And with it, himself.

The candle went out beside the Book and Evri the servant started, dismayed, guessing incorrectly that the god had come to thwart him in his audacity, and prevent him from returning to the moment he was chosen by the god. Instead, it was his future self who found a measure of peace at the betrayal, as the watching consciousness was scattered to the winds of the spirit plane, and only the present self, still enslaved, remained.

**Author's Note:**

> Additional content notes: violence; time loop which is intended to kill one future version of a self; unhappy end
> 
> Dear AlTheAlchemist, I'm happy you asked for this song again because I listened to it last year because of your request and really liked it then. I hope you have a great exchange.


End file.
